Leonard Schwartz, At Element

Cover illustration by Peter Hristoff. Used with permission.ISBN: 978-1-58498-085-8, paper, $16.95"At Element and If work together, articulating a form of perceiving and being, to address the ontological status of the individual.AtElement constructsagrounduponwhichtheinquiringchorusof “if” posesitselfin thelatterwork.Exploringthedynamicstatusofwhatiscommonlyheld (fiercely)asthesovereign individual-thattheindividualandthemind arefixed,definite-bothtexts createaspaceinwhichtheconditionof existenceisbothcritiquedandcelebrated.Anewvocabularyofinquiry, startingfrom theposition ofwriting from theinterior,ispresentedto thepoet/reader." --Bombay Gin

“As Schwartz posits in his introduction, true nature poetry is not that which stands outside nature and addresses it, but that which recognizes that we speak, always and inevitably, from within it. Acting upon this insight, he has created a nature poetry that up-ends all previous understandings of the term through an engagement with language that underscores it as an act of nature. Full of startling observations and illuminating non-sequiturs, At Element is composed of disarmingly simple assertions that build into complex, irreducible, and unparaphrasable towers of idea and impression. Often warm, often charming, they emanate a generosity and an intimacy so penetrating that they make the generous and the intimate modes of thought in their own right.” --Cole Swensen“As the world swiftly disarticulates, At Element provides an intensely considered poetry of witness. Turn by turn ‘imbedded in the book’ and spoken ‘from within the thing’, At Element navigates the wasteland of Eros’ impoverishment, and retrieves its fundamental fire.” --Rikki Ducornet“The poet wanders through these poems, lost in the forest of correspondences, excited by the loss, observing, essaying, conversing with ethereal figures, a flaneur of the present drifting through the brightly lit city or the dark halls of sleep with equal acuity and bewilderment, beholden to the senses but also what’s beyond them. In these profound and strange poems, we have “a refutation/of the post-human¼/spellbound in /uncompleted waters.” --Eleni Sikelianos

See also:http://theconversant.org/?p=3095http://tinfisheditor.blogspot.com/2011/11/prepositions-sic-about-rage-leonard.htmlLeonard Schwartz is the author of numerous books of poetry including, most recently, A Message Back and Other Furors (Chax Press, 2007), The Library of Seven Readings (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2007), Language as Responsibility (Tinfish Editions, 2006), and The Tower Of Diverse Shores, Ear And Ethos, and Words Before The Articulate, all from Talisman House. In addition he is the author of A Flicker At The Edge Of Things: Essays on Poetics (Spuyten Duyvil). He hosts and produces the radio program Cross Cultural Poetics.